By Bill Mann

This was the week that shook Canada 40 years ago. I witnessed it firsthand. And not the best time for a terrorist hoax, exactly 40 years to the day after the ugliness began.

“The October Crisis,” as it’s now known in Canada, was that country’s first experience with political terrorism, when a renegade francophone group called the FLQ (Front for the Liberation of Quebec) kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner, James Cross, at gunpoint from his house in a comfortable English-speaking neighborhood on October 5, 1970.

Five days later, another FLQ cell snatched Quebec’s Labor Minister, Pierre Laporte, while he was playing football in his front yard. Laporte was found dead two weeks later, dumped in a car trunk.

I had just arrived in Montreal the month before as a youthful immigrant to Canada, eager to use my fluency in Parisian (but NOT Quebecois) French. I was one of the few Yanks in Montreal who weren’t there to beat the U.S. draft and avoid Vietnam.

My very first day at work as a sportswriter at the Montreal Gazette, the English-speaking morning daily, I was amazed to find federal troops around the building. Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, himself a Quebecker and also an ardent foe of the Quebec separatist movement, had just declared the War Measures Act, a virtual martial law that suspended habeas corpus. He had sent federal troops into largely peaceful Quebec to maintain order.

It was probably the most atypically Canadian time in history, but a worrisome time in a usually peaceful and polite country and province. In previous years, the FLQ had already killed and injured dozens of people, and bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange.

Huge tabloid-ish newspaper headlines about the kidnapped Cross and Laporte were a daily occurrence. On October 16, Trudeau declared the War Measures Act. The next day, Laporte’s body was found. He’d been strangled to death. It took until December for diplomat Cross to finally be released — in exchange for his captors’ safe passage to Cuba.

It was the kind of terrorism the U.S. wouldn’t experience until years later, on 9-11. Even today, those events, which led to years of political uncertainty in Quebec and Canada, still are a chilling thought to many Canadians.

That’s why this week’s arrest of Quebec City man Martin Levesque for perpetrating a terrorist hoax on the very same day “La Crise d’Octobre” began with Cross’ abduction was especially ill-timed and opened old wounds and bad memories. (The reclusive Cross gave a rare interview from Britain last week to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation).

The 41-year-old Levesque, who’s been released on bail, is charged with perpetrating a terrorist hoax on a Facebook page in posts touting the benefits of the FLQ and threatening to “make bombs explode” again — just like the bombings the radical separatist group detonated in the 1960′s.

One day during that portentous Canadian autumn of 1970, I remember watching military helicopters circling in downtown Montreal as I looked out the windows of the Gazette newsroom. ( The big English-language newspaper was also a potential terrorist target, we’d been warned).

A courtly Canadian editor in his 70s put a comforting hand on my shoulder and said, “You couldn’t have come here at a more atypical time, Bill. This is the most un-Canadian thing you could possibly imagine, these troops, the kidnappings and all. This is a peaceful country.”